Glossary
Load Testing
Load testing drives artificial traffic into a system at target or peak volumes to measure how it performs, where it degrades, and at what point it fails.
General definition
Load testing is a type of performance testing that applies a realistic or extreme volume of concurrent requests to a service so engineers can observe response times, error rates, and resource consumption before users do. It answers the question: can this system handle the load we expect, and what happens when it exceeds that load?
- Ramp-up tests gradually increase users to find the saturation point
- Soak tests run sustained load for hours to detect memory leaks or slow degradation
- Spike tests apply sudden bursts to simulate viral traffic or flash crowds
- Stress tests push beyond expected capacity to find the breaking point
Results feed directly into capacity planning, autoscaling configuration, and the targets set in SLOs and SLAs. Common open-source tools include k6, Locust, and Apache JMeter.
In the Ethora ecosystem
On a cloud-hosted messaging plan, load testing responsibilities fall primarily on the provider. The provider has already load-tested the shared infrastructure and publishes the resulting capacity guarantees in an SLA. Customers inherit that tested baseline and simply choose a tier that covers their expected concurrency.
With a dedicated or self-hosted chat server, you own the infrastructure and own the testing. Ethora can run load-test scripts against your environment before go-live, help interpret results, and jointly define SLO targets for your deployment under a support contract. This is especially valuable in healthcare and finance, where a performance regression can breach compliance commitments. Talk to the team about pre-launch capacity planning.
